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The most efficient of such masks is that worn by Great Wally, the famous correspondent
who commands the unwavering respect of all in the ‘Wayang Club’, hiding what Cookie calls
‘Wally’s secret obsession’. Wally’s monumental stature is not just a physical apparition. Pete
Curtis, the most competitive of all in the Wayang, defers to Wally as the only real ‘journalist:
the rest of us were just reporters’ (YLD, 59), though no one quite knows how Wally gets his
stories, ensconced, as he ever is, firmly on his stool in the Wayang Bar. This profoundly
enigmatic man must hide his self behind the veil of respectability while indulging in the most
forbidden of taboos in the mid-sixties. He exhibits no homosexual or pederastic traits, and
clothes his passions with an eating mania, two obsessions which Southeast Asia gives Wally
the unique chance to combine. He romanticises his relationships with the young male
prostitutes in Singapore, saying, ‘I felt like André Gide discovering the beautiful Arab boys’
(YLD, 60), though in nearly the same breath he admits, ‘I’m living on the edge of a volcano’
(YLD, 59).
Kevin Condon, whose fetish is driving around the kampongs searching for exposed
breasts, is a heterosexual soulmate of Wally O’Sullivan’s. Cookie says ‘he was in love with
his own frustration, and visual images of the unattainable were, I guessed, at least as important
to him as physical consummation’. Condon can not bring himself to enjoy the prostitutes at
the cemetery like Pete Curtis, for he is ‘looking for a sexual Eden in Java which could not be
entered for money’. The ever-sympathetic Cookie says, ‘I often wished the green bronze
nymph at the edge of the Oasis pool would come to life for him’. Like Wally, Condon is
aware of the irrationality of his passion. Though Cookie judges him a ‘humourless, finicky
man, essentially conformist in every way’ his ‘humility made him aware that his own
earnestness was amusing to us: he would play up to our mockery, caricaturing himself’ in both
the innocent and lecherous masks he wore. He would say, ‘I got the most marvellous
photograph today, Cookie—the boobs were immense’, and with ‘dog-like eyes’ he would plead
for a respite from the fact that ‘you can never get to know one of the women’. Then, to
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